


Highways

by Callmeakittenbabe



Category: Original Work
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Big Gay Love Story, Blood, Crying, F/M, Falling In Love, Friends to Lovers, Gay, I hate you but it hurts, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Multi, Parties, Sad, Suicide, Underage Drinking, Underage Drug Use, Xavier and Darren, Xavier/Caspian, it needs more love, please read this, small artistic messy boi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-09-22
Updated: 2017-09-24
Packaged: 2019-01-03 18:12:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,938
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12152076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Callmeakittenbabe/pseuds/Callmeakittenbabe
Summary: Xavier had lived in a world of his own creation, full of hatred and malice before he met Darren. Darren was an artist, an optimist, he viewed the world like art, something that would eventually lead to his suicide. Left in the ashes, Xavier has to learn to rebuild himself from what Darren had left and to fight the self-hatred that has begun to pull him down the same path that it took Darren.





	1. Chapter One: Moon Mist

They try to tell you that death is a beautiful thing. That life is an illusion and that we should welcome death with open arms, but I still remember. Corn silk and blood. Coloured pencils, doodles locked in a little box. Death isn’t beautiful. Death is selfish. 

 

I knew a man once, who had found within himself, the profound ability to gaze upon the world and to discern beauty in all things

 

His body had been found on the side of the street, crumpled like a rag doll, his head lolling backwards staring at the sun that the had so often marveled over. I had met his eyes, muddy, lifeless things, sitting idly  in his shrunken face and I shrunk away. They were fixed upon the heavens as if he were expecting some sort of ethereal reply to a question that hadn’t been heard by ay human ear.

 

Corn silk hair lay matted against his filthy skin, his mouth stained with flaking blood. Those  bruised lips were parted in a look of surprise, almost as though he didn’t anticipate the blow that would take the breath from his lungs in a final morbid joke.

 

I like to imagine that he died laughing, the boy from the road. I like to imagine that the way his mouth curved up wasn’t some distorted mockery forced upon him by life and that he had fallen into the road mid sentence.

 

It's so much less painful to think of it that way.

 

It's too easy to imagine blood on porcelain long before the car struck his body. To take the white brushstrokes on his arms and colour them in scarlet, blood like watered down paint splattering onto rumpled white hotel sheets.

 

Had he flung himself into traffic open armed, expecting death, inviting it even? Had he gone quietly? Tucked to himself on the cold pavement, with nothing but the stars to keep vigil as he stiffened and chilled, collecting the morning dew. 

 

Darren was his name. He had turned nineteen six months prior to his personal invite to ditch the world of the living.

 

What he possessed in the world was compacted into a tidy room at the local motel haunted by the residual sound of the freeway outside. The cars manifested in a dull rumble, swelling and subsiding as both hours and traffic changed, an occasional horn piercing the mesmerizing roar.

 

A battered acoustic guitar lay propped against the wall, the cream colored paint peeling and flaking around it. It’s pick was still tucked meticulously under the top strings, waiting to be plucked up and put to use by a man who would never again take his instrument into his hands.

 

Coloured pencils in cool shades lay spread on the rickety desk. They swirled together in my vision like some sort of ocean. Blues like Forget-Me-Not flowers and Seafoam tangled with Iris and Violet, who, somewhere in that scene had joined hands with Kiwi and Enchanted Forest. It would have been beautiful had I not known the man who had closed his fingers around the worn wood, colour staining his fingers and hands as he etched his world into paper.

 

Those same hands had wrapped themselves around my shoulders, cold in the November air the first time we had kissed. It was a revelation, I had believed that the world was dedicated to the pursual of evil until I felt his hands touch my face and realized how little malice I myself could hold in that moment. 

 

Now I stood alone in the frigid hotel room, my breaths billowing into the air like smoke from the end of a cigarette. His bed was still rumpled and empty, sheets tossed haphazardly to the side, trailing off the bed. 

 

I could practically see him sitting on the edge of it, his lanky legs crossed carefully as he etched out a drawing in pencil, his acorn coloured eyes boring into the paper, flitting up to catch my own, a small smile curving his lips. Any moment now he would stand and gather his supplies, tucking them away in the little tin box that shone in the lamplight. Any moment now… I looked up again, seeing nothing before me except the cold room and the frost clinging to the window pane. 

 

On legs like a fawn's, unsteady and shaky, I crossed the room. The boards under my feet creaked and groaned, the toes of my boots tapping out a slow rhythm on the worn wood. Carefully, I pushed the shuttered door of the closet aside, my hands wrapping around the chilled edges of the box and pulling it into my arms, the sides pressing lines into my chest and biceps.

 

Delicately, I settled the box onto the desk, lifting colors into the box and arranging them in their proper slots beside Vermillion, Sunflower and Hickory. It was silent work, save for the occasional click of wood on metal,though I read every label that decorated the wood of the pencils.

With numb fingers, I fumbled with the latches, the box closing with a sharp metallic click. The chill that permeated the handles burned my already tingling fingers as I tucked it into my backpack, settling my hoodie around it carefully and zipping my bag. 

 

I shouldered the bag, turning to look at the room, bare and void of colour, for the last time. 

“I have to go.” I said, to no one particular, my voice sounding hollow in the vastness of the room, the words leaving my lips stinging as though they hurt to say.

 

The door slid open into the morning light that poured over my hair and face in fine droplets that seeped through the gaps in the treeline like rain. I wished there had been protest, hands on my shoulders, around my waist, I hated leaving him and he hated being alone which made his death even more ironic.

 

I took the bus home, stood under the icicle laden awning that waited beside a sign displaying the bussing schedule. Chilly air bit at my skin like shards of glass and goose pimples had formed on my arms, raising the skin that wasn’t warmed by my hands.

 

Had he trembled as he laid there in the cold of the morning, blood on his hands and on his lips? Had he been cold, dressed only in jeans and his hoodie and settled on the scant amount of grass that grew in clumps beside the road? 

 

The bus squealed to a stop before me, splattering my sneakers with slush, slate coloured and flecked with dirt and god knows what else.

 

I clambered in.

  
  



	2. Muted Grey

The bus smelled of old shoes and cigarette smoke, sharp and acrid, cutting through the senses like a knife through butter. My money rattled into the box the driver extended in my direction and I settled myself into one of the worn seats near the back, the fabric rough against my palms.

 

In the morning, the bus seems to hold the entire world inside of it and today was no exception.

 

An old woman, hunched like a stony gargoyle over her walker made her way carefully to a front seat. Her husband, a tall wraithlike man, shadowed close behind her, as though he was afraid that she would fall and shatter.

 

A young woman with a sad face and bruises decorating her cheekbone stood beside the seat where her toddler slept, sprawled out, his chubby face covered by wispy blonde curls.

 

A businessman dressed in a fine suit, a plum pocket square protruding from his pocket had settled in the front and was making friendly conversation with the driver over a cup of black gas-station coffee. 

 

I watched them all as if I were peering at them through glass, my mind numb with lack of sleep, eyes burning with residue from the tears that I had shed the night before. 

 

I turned from them, resolving to gaze away from them and out the wet pavement rolling by outside of the window. They were so alive, so insanely human that it pained me to watch them. It was almost as though they mocked me. 

 

‘They’re alive.’ The slow pulse of their speech screamed at me. ‘They’re alive and you’re alone.’ 

 

The sharp salty tang of iron filled my mouth and I released my lip from the confines of my teeth, the dull ache that I had hardly noticed before trickling away.

 

The fabric under me rasped against the denim of my jeans as I turned to check my stop on the light up map above me and I rose, acutely aware that it was in fact my stop next. 

 

I emerged into the cold air, the way a child would emerge into warm sunlight, savouring it, my face turned up to the biting wind. I jogged across the street, towards my house, the sidewalk slick underneath my feet.

 

It was quiet outside, the wind stirring the trees to sway like dancers. It led them in a slow dance, twirling them and letting them bend as far as they could without snapping them.

 

‘Him, he had taught me to think like this. He had shown me how beautiful life could be. How stupid he was to throw that life away… How senseless, how heartless.’ I  thought, sadness quickly morphing into hatred and resentment. 

I veered off the road, onto the path that marked out my house’s driveway and moved even farther off of that. My vision had gone red and I was very aware of the angry sounds that surrounded me, torn from my own lips. 

When I became conscious to the world again, I stood before a large oak tree, my hands shaking, knuckles raw and violently bruised.

I stared at them, aware of the tear stains that cut paths into my cheeks. “Iris.” I recited, lifting my bag onto my back, the straps seeming to cut into my skin. “Iris, Violet, Blood Red, Black, Vein Blue.”

His colours became my mantra then, my way to blame him, to hate him for leaving me alone. Losing him was like the earth losing the sun or the moon losing the earth. I had lost my gravity and I was lost, floating around in a hollow vacuum.

The door to my house seemed to weigh one thousand pounds, my bedroom door impossibly heavier, though I shoved it open. 

It was the same as it had always been. White walls, a bookshelf full of classics and indie novels I had promised that I would read but never did. My keyboard sat in the corner and my bed sat beside it still made from the day before.

I threw myself into bed, burying my face against the pillows, my chest tight with tears that refused to come despite how I urged them. How I longed to be held, to have someone to talk to, to mourn with. But I had no one. No one had know Darren the way I did. No one bothered to try…

There’s something messed up about the refusal to know a person because of what you think they are.   We’re all broken people, we’re all people who need to be kept safe from the cruel reality that lurks just outside our fields of disillusionment. 

Everyone deserves a chance to live and depriving them of that chance is like clipping a bird’s wings, it kills their soul. When we learn to love and be love, it’s like a dove, flinging itself into the air, into flight.  Suffice it to say, I lived for two years before I died beside Darren on that roadside.


End file.
